


Danse Macabre

by weakinteraction



Category: The Wicked + The Divine
Genre: F/M, The Dancing Dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 11:20:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4623414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><div class="center">
  <p>THE VALENTINE'S DAY MASCARA</p>
  <p>An alternative celebration</p>
  <p>Lineup TBA<br/>Devil's Tavern, Highgate<br/>Friday 14.2.14<br/>Doors 8pm<br/>£20/£15 in advance</p>
</div>
            </blockquote>





	Danse Macabre

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jayjaybe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jayjaybe/gifts).



14 FEBRUARY 2014

Baphomet lifts his hand, thumb and finger a hair's breadth apart.

"One!"

A frisson shivers through the crowd in front of him. Is he just counting in the next song, or is something altogether more violent about to happen? Exactly as he intended; everything that happened with Lucifer is still fresh in their minds.

"Two!"

It is this moment that all the members of the pantheon have in common: staring out from a stage and seeing themselves reflected back in the mortals who have come to commune with them. Baphomet has watched from backstage at an Amaterasu gig as the front row faints, overcome with the sheer pleasure she feels when she performs. He's skulked by the fire exit during one of Inanna's afterparties, and seen those assembled there blur together, transcending the limitations of their individual identities. He's maintained a safe distance as Sakhmet's followers abandoned themselves to their raw animal instincts.

"Three!"

And what does Baphomet see, in the mirror held up by the mortals? Creatures of the darkness, come shambling from their lairs. Some are truly nocturnal, never emerging from their basement flats or curtains-drawn bedsits in daylight. Others, from respectable semis and commuter crash pads, have transformed themselves under the light of the full moon into their true selves. Darkened hair frames painted-pale faces, a wide variety of outfits in variations of black: crushed velvet, shiny leather like his own jacket, the matt black of a simple T-shirt offset by a design picked out in white. Only a few weeks ago he would have been jealous to see so many wearing Luci's stylised inverted pentagrams. Now it seems a fitting tribute.

Baphomet bares his fangs and snarls, "Four!"

KLLK.

And all in one moment: the monitor directly in front of him on the stage explodes, the drums kick in as a howl of feedback from the guitars fills the room, cool blue lights spiral back and forth across the floor, the crowd begins to move.

A few bars later, Baphomet begins to sing, crooning softly over the band a paean about the intolerability of mundane existence. And then, when the chorus comes, he knows the crowd is truly his. Fast-whirling circles form spontaneously in the mosh pit; the quieter crowd towards the back starts headbanging and pogoing; the couple fucking in the back corner claw at each other, thrusting wildly to the rhythm.

The next verse, and the room calms a little, but it is the gap between flash and shock wave. Everyone is waiting for the next chorus, including Baphomet, even as he sings what remains of his heart out in the existential loneliness of the middle eight.

It's at times like this that he understands what his gift is meant to be, why he was brought forth into this world from the unpromising raw material of his old, discarded identity. Two years? Two minutes would be enough. Just let him get to the end of this song and the memory of this gig will burn in the minds of everyone who walks away for the rest of their lives.

But when the chorus comes back around, there is a change. The crowd explodes into motion, but they are no longer his; things have twisted. They swirl around in patterns not of his making. His eyes scan the room; only another member of the pantheon could have done this. He realises who before he sees her, when he suddenly registers that the motion of the crowd is the flocking of crows. It is his three-fold queen, come to visit him in the overworld. And now he knows that it is her, he can see her around the room. The mortals can only deal with one of her aspects at once, but he can see all of her. All of her that she allows to be seen, anyway: her triplicate nature conceals as much as it reveals.

There: slouched against the wall, motionless except for a single foot tapping along to the music. Gentle Annie.

There: in the middle of the mosh pit, leading the surging revellers backwards and forwards into a deepening frenzy. Badb.

And here: emerging onto the stage, arms aloft and fiercely grinning. Morrigan herself, eyes sparkling along with the sequins on her crushed velvet dress.

The crowd is momentarily stunned into silence, astonished to see her above ground. And then they break into applause, cheering and catcalls. Baphomet knows that now tonight will not just inspire those in the room, but everyone they tell about what they saw. And they will tell the story, over and over again, for the rest of their long mortal life.

As the chorus ends, the song peters out, the band unsure what to do next. Baphomet grabs the microphone. "Please welcome, for one night only, a very special guest: the one-and-only three-fold Morrigan!" The words are irrelevant -- they know who she is; they are already greeting her with their roar of adulation -- but speaking them is an important part of the ritual.

Down in the front row, Badb begins a chant demanding one of her own songs. Baphomet looks round at his band, who shrug -- they know it well enough to get by. Once the whole crowd is yelling for them to start, Badb pulls herself up on to the stage. He wonders what the mortals see, their minds sliding off the triune truth of the divinity among them. Are they so focused on Morrigan that they don't even notice? Do they register that someone has climbed onto the stage, but imagine that they must have been bustled away by security?

Gentle Annie is here now, too, having snuck backstage. As Morrigan begins to sing, she whispers in his ear, "Poor underking, his thunder stolen by his mighty queen."

"If you want to steal thunder, crash Baal's gig," Baphomet says out of the side of his mouth.

"The lord of storms performs not on this night of love," Annie says.

Badb snorts. "Should say, he gives an intimate performance for a very select audience." Baphomet smirks: Inanna has nothing scheduled for tonight either.

And then Morrigan reaches the chorus and he finds himself a backing singer at his own gig. The crowd has been transformed: the aggression and violence he had fomented in them has dissipated. Instead, they sway, lighters in the air, as Morrigan sings the closest thing in her catalogue to a ballad. Most of these people don't smoke, and none of them are allowed to do so here, but they have all brought lighters with them. Another part of the ritual. The couple in the back corner cling to each other, shuddering through a mutual orgasm.

Morrigan sings on, the lyrics near-nonsensical, the band improvising something that sounds vaguely right, but it is unimportant. Her performance transmutes all the imperfections into pure meaning. No: the imperfections are the meaning. The world is imperfect. Life is imperfect. Death is random. But at the same time all these are pure, perfect truths to be embraced.

As the song ends, Badb leans in towards him. "Remember her words? The shrivelled crone?"

Annie strokes his cheek. "You will be loved."

"You will be hated," Badb spits in his other ear, and then goes to the microphone. Baphomet wonders if the crowd even notice the change in the aspect Morrigan is presenting to them, or if all they see is a black void in the shape of a woman, silhouetted by the lights behind her.

Badb's song is, predictably enough, much more aggressive than Morrigan's. Without really realising he is doing it, Baphomet starts to strum on his guitar, deepening the bass line. The energy in the crowd is building again, but somehow it is directed outwards, rather than towards the stage as it was before. He has the same shiver down his spine as when he lies in her chamber, at her mercy: the three-in-one is planning something, and he doesn't know what.

He only has a moment to wonder, as Morrigan comes across to him as Badb starts to sing. She puts "But here is what Ananke didn't say. She didn't say, 'You will love'. She didn't say, 'You will hate'. But you do, don't you, Baphomet?"

"Love them for being inspired by you," Annie says. "Hate them for daring to live on after you to share that inspiration."

"A death god should not be afraid to die," Morrigan says, scratching her finger down his cheek.

But he is, and she knows it. He fears his death precisely because of what she said when she doomed him.

"We call them mortals," Annie whispers. "Yet they live longer than us."

She does not know all of it, though. What frightens him is not the mere fact of his death, but the manner she foretold for it. Alone, she had said. Utterly alone and unmourned. And if that is true, then where will she be?

"They came here on _this_ night," Morrigan says to him. "To show their love for you."

"Show them you love them," Annie says.

"Show them what _you_ love," Morrigan adds. She doesn't mean her.

Badb's song is coming to the end, a crescendo of screaming rage from the goddess of war. The crowd surge forwards, arms outstretched towards them, and suddenly Baphomet understands what it is about to happen.

And then it is happening: he and Badb are running off the stage to be borne aloft by the assembled mass. They crowd-surf all the way to the doors at the back and then run hand in hand down the narrow stairs, the gig goers following so fast they are propelling them down.

They surge through a handful of bemused regulars in the bar downstairs, a few half-deaf old folk the only ones able to tolerate the noise, and out into the nighttime street.

Instantly, flickers of blinding white cut through the murky sodium-yellow of the streetlights. The throng outside, summoned by the news spreading on social media of his presence as the gig's "secret" headline act, respond atavistically to the sight of something new by taking a picture to prove that they saw it. They have not yet realised who is with him, or perhaps they have forgotten the stories of what happens to those foolish enough to try to entrap the image of the Queen of Darkness in fleeting patterns of light.

But before Baphomet has time to wonder what they see when the pictures come up on their screens, he and Badb -- and Morrigan and Annie, somehow now at the front of the crowd too -- have parted the assembled mass and come out onto the road. The gig goers follow and the larger crowd that had gathered on the pavement outside turn and join them. Car horns blare and tyres screech as they surge down the street, led by Morrigan's laughter, Badb's cackling and Annie's ululating yells of joy.

When they reach the cemetery, the gods quickly scale the gates. The crowd clambers over the walls, pushing each other over and helping each other up, an unstoppable tide sweeping up bystanders in its wake.

Inside the cemetery, though, there is silence. The exhilarated shouts and screams of the crowd are stilled by the reality of where they are as soon as they arrive on the other side of the wall. When they are all inside, staring around in mixed wonder and fear at what might be about to happen, Baphomet finds a gravestone wide enough for him to mount and climbs on to it. Morrigan -- all three of her -- hang back. Soon there will be many more arriving, called forth by messages sent by those already here; a picture of Baphomet will speed that process immensely.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" Baphomet shouts.

Baphomet feels his eldritch power surging through him, and out of him. He raises his arms symbolically, but it is downwards that his awareness reaches, downwards and outwards to the bodies stacked one on top of another in the graves and crypts all around, through moss-covered stone to bleached bone.

"Let's not love-fool ourselves: many of you came here tonight to avoid the expectations that surround this date, the expectation that you _will_ have a date."

He feels the stirrings in the ground, stirrings that he has created, that he is sustaining. This is every bit as much a performance as his set earlier, and infinitely more draining. But it will inspire these mortals far more than anything he has done before. Of course this is his queen's idea: she is always encouraging him to test his limits.

"But I ask you to remember that here with us now are those who have been waiting for a date for far longer than you have been alive."

The first cadaverous hand begins to break through the soil of the grave nearest him.

He drops his voice to a low rumble. "And so I ask you to dance with them."

And now skeletons are bursting out of graves all around him, tattered strips of flesh hanging from their bones; mummified corpses are stumbling from the crypts into the moonlight.

"For it is written: their bodies will rise again!" Baphomet yells, imitating the rhythms of a revivalist preacher. "Those who sleep in the earth will rise up ... and ROCK OUT!"

For a moment, nothing happens. And then Morrigan, Annie and Badb each take the hand of one of the corpses and begin to waltz them gently around. They form a spiralling pattern around Baphomet, tracing a complex interlocking glyph in patterns of trampled grass. The mortals follow their lead, and soon the night is filled with dancing. There is no music, but there doesn't need to be. The rhythm is the ticking of the clock that counts away their mortal lives, the striking of the bell that has already tolled for those they dance with. As far as Baphomet can see, living and dead are communing together. Soon the whole cemetery will be full, but before dawn he will have sent the corpses back to their resting places to sleep for who knows how much longer.

Annie whirls towards him, releasing the corpse she is dancing with as she does so. "Gentle Annie cannot help you, rag and bone man," she says. "But you can help these people." A nearby mortal begins to dance with the corpse, and Annie takes his hand and pulls him down from the grave.

"The underworld reaches out to the overworld," she says as she dances with him, and kisses him gently.

Badb cuts in and Annie melts away into the crowd. "Badb will reward the underking!" She leans in in imitation of Annie's kiss, but Baphomet growls at her and lunges for her neck. She snatches her head away, laughing. "Later!"

And then he is dancing with Morrigan. She says nothing, just looks at him mournfully, hands on each other's hips and foreheads resting together as they shuffle in slow circles.

Baphomet looks around once more as they dance and dance towards the sunrise, the inevitable end of their revels. The mortals think they are touching the relics of the past, but really they are seeing the truth of their own inevitable mortal future. Some will understand it consciously, others will grasp it only in nightmares. But they will know. That is his true gift to them. And he thinks he understands, finally, why Morrigan wanted him to do all this: so that he would in the end reflect them as much as they reflect him, so that he could give that gift to himself.

Baphomet looks inside himself, and even as he dances on, he knows that he cannot.


End file.
